5 Platforms to Help You Find Influencers Today

In a time where traditional advertising has fallen out of favor with consumers and brands alike, marketers are seeking new ways to connect with their target audience. One of the most popular new forms of marketing centers on using people with their own built-in audience to promote your products. These people have been dubbed influencers, for their ability to motivate those who follow them to purchase the same products they use (or claim to use). Influencer marketing has become one of the fastest-growing methods of reaching customers. If you spend any time on social media, you’ve probably already encountered sponsored posts, where celebrities (or just talented social media users) insert promotion for brands into their normal content. If you’re interested in using influencer marketing for your company, you’ve got to start by finding influencers. Here are five platforms to help you find and connect with influencers that can benefit your brand.

1. Use Topsy To Find The Most Popular Tweets On Any Topic

A great place to start finding accounts that wield a lot of influence in the audience you’re trying to target is to find the most popular posts about topics related to your product. Topsy can help you with that. You type a term into its search bar and it spits out all of the Twitter posts related to that subject, ever. You can then sort them by time period, so you can look at the most popular recent posts or the top tweets of all time. If you can find accounts that are generating huge amounts of interest in a topic adjacent to your product, you can leverage them to turn their followers into customers.

2. Crowdfire Can Help You Track Twitter and Instagram Accounts In Your Niche

With nearly a billion Twitter accounts and 800 million Instagram accounts out there, there’s a lot of different users to sort through when looking for influencers. Crowdfire can help. The program, which is available on a freemium model, helps you find people to follow who align closely with your chosen parameters. It’s a great way to aggregate a ton of potential influencers, that you can then monitor and winnow down to a smaller list to choose from.

3. Deep Social Lets You Dive into Data On Potential Influencers

If you’ve got your eye on an influencer whose content is well-aligned with your brand’s mission, you should make sure their audience is also aligned with what you’re targeting. Just because someone tweets or posts a lot about a topic that corresponds with what you’re selling doesn’t mean that’s the reason people are following them. Deep Social can give you data on the gender, age, interests, geography, and engagement level of an influencer’s follower base. This is a great way to weed out fake influencers.

4. Podbay.fm Can Introduce You to Podcasters with Valuable Audiences

Podcasts have emerged as one of the most popular and widely-discussed forms of media. Millions of people now listen to these audio recordings, which are typically informative or entertaining, while working, commuting, or doing chores, and they turn out in droves to see live performances from hosts. The level of engagement between fans and podcasters is very high, making podcasters effective influencers. You can use Podbay.fm to rank podcasts in the genre that most closely corresponds with your target audience, then delve in deeper to see if your product is compatible with the hosts’ interests.

5. Alltop Helps You Spot Powerful Bloggers

While most of these platforms rely purely on data, Alltop has a human element. People comb through blog posts to find the most popular and most powerful posts from each day, divided into multiple niches. You can use Alltop to identify bloggers whose audiences hang on their every word—and that high level of engagement translates to very effective influencer marketing campaigns.

The savviest company/influencer combos come across as completely organic, with the product fitting perfectly into the established brand of the influencer, and thus appealing to followers who aspire to the same lifestyle. If you want to make influencer marketing work for your company, you’ve got to find these types of relationships, where your interests and your partners’ dovetail perfectly. The platforms above can help you find these people and connect with them.